Cooperative intelligence: Taking action

Cooperative intelligence, NOT competitive intelligence

It is important to realize that monitoring the competitive intelligence – discovering the strengths and vulnerabilities of competitors – is not the key to driving your business to success.

By focusing on competitive intelligence, you may gather a lot of information about competitors. However, by doing this, you are missing out on an integral part of business development: networking, and building relationships with people who will be able to help you.

Thus, your company should focus on cooperative intelligence. By focusing on cooperative intelligence, you will find ways you may help others and they, in turn, may help you to learn what you need to know to make your business a success.

Cooperative intelligence in real-time: Through social media

In a post on her blog, cooperative intelligence blog, Ellen Naylor explains: “Many companies think they are conducting real-time competitive intelligence since they monitor the competitive environment continuously on the Internet and increasingly through social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook…while monitoring is the foundation of real-time competitive intelligence, it is not actionable. The action you take in real-time will give you a competitive advantage.

Social media monitoring aids companies in fostering cooperative intelligence. To quote Naylor, “Managers can inform people in our companies in real-time, and in areas where we have more knowledge, make recommendations for action.”

In an article published on Business Insider, Gianluigi Cuccureddu says: “Making social media monitoring efforts actionable is a human process….organizations must incorporate a cooperative intelligent apparatus within their daily operations and processes, being able to respond to external opportunities and threats as quickly and as good as possible, and enhance competitive advantages to the outside.”

Cooperative intelligence with OneDesk

As Naylor says, “Leadership, connection and communication are integrated in the practice of cooperative intelligence.” OneDesk allows you to stay connected with employees, customers and partners at all times. The software is interactive; its social collaboration tools such as community forums, chats, messaging, blogs, and polls facilitate communication and collaboration.

OneDesk’s social media monitoring tool allows you to listen to the social web and find out what people are saying about your brands. Since all applications within OneDesk are interconnected, you can respond to social media comments directly from your OneDesk account. Your response will show up on the site they were originally posted. From there, you can bring the comments into OneDesk, and take action on them.